Following the toppling of the Baathist regime, in May 2003 the United States established the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), which was to serve as the occupational authority and interim government of Iraq under the leadership of Lewis Paul Bremer III. Despite the fact that Iraq had just endured a spectacular military defeat, the death of untold thousands of civilians and the devastation of much of its civil infrastructure and was in the grip of lawlessness and disorder, Bremer's foremost concern as head of the CPA was to de-Baathify Iraq. Indeed, Bremer's first official act was to issue Order Number 1: De-Baathification of Iraqi Society, written only three days after his arrival in Baghdad. The order sought to disestablish the Baath party by ‘eliminating the party's structures and removing its leadership from positions of authority and responsibility in Iraqi society’ (Bremer 2003a: 1). Specifically, this order prescribed the wholesale exclusion from public service of individuals who had occupied any of the four uppermost membership levels of the Baath.

A week later, on 23 May, Bremer continued the de-Baathification effort with Order Number 2: Dissolution of Entities, which ordered the dismissal of thousands of Iraqis from paid employment and the disbanding of several key Baathist institutions. This included important ministries, every arm of Iraq's extensive military machine, certain bureaucratic and governmental mechanisms, and even seemingly innocuous bodies like the National Olympic Committee (Bremer 2003b: 4–5). Two days later, Bremer issued two further edicts that supported this process of de- Baathification. The second of these was titled Order Number 5: Establishment of the Iraqi De-Baathification Council, which created an entity that was to be officially responsible for overseeing the de-Baathifi cation of Iraq. This body was to be made up entirely of Iraqi nationals hand picked by Bremer, and headed by a controversial Shia Arab Iraqi exile who had provided suspect information to the US in the lead up to the intervention, Ahmed Chalabi.

During the first months of the occupation, the De-Baathification Council (DBC) was charged with advising the CPA about individual Baath party members as well as investigating ‘the extent, nature, locations and current status of all Iraqi Baath Party property and assets’ (Bremer 2003c: 2).